How to remove all first articles from a string?

Question

I have a list where i want to remove all first articles: ["the house", "the beautiful garten", "the beautiful garten of the house"]

and i want the list to only contain: ["house", "beautiful garten", "beautiful garten of the house"]

If the first word is an article, then remove. In case the articles appears in the sentence, they should be kept.

Is it always just `the ` you want to remove, or is there a list of articles (e.g. `['the', 'an', 'his']`) — match, Nov 02 '22 at 11:10

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 02 '22 at 09:57

1

If you're working with python try

new_list = [s[4:] if s.startswith('the ') else s for s in old_list]

answered Nov 02 '22 at 09:57

frfritz

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Andrej Kesely · Answer 2 · 2022-11-02T13:38:58.087

1

Another option is using re (this example will also ignore whitespaces around the first the:

import re

lst = ["the house", "the beautiful garten", "the beautiful garten of the house"]

pat = re.compile(r"^\s*the\s+", flags=re.I)
out = [pat.sub("", w) for w in lst]

print(out)

Prints:

['house', 'beautiful garten', 'beautiful garten of the house']

edited Nov 02 '22 at 13:38

answered Nov 02 '22 at 11:08

Andrej Kesely

168,389
15
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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 02 '22 at 11:29

If you have a list of potential articles or words to be trimmed, you can do the following to remove that word plus the following space:

articles = ["the", "a", "an"]

sentences = ["the house", "a beautiful garten", "an amazing garten of the house"]


out = []
for s in sentences:
    new = s
    for a in articles:
      if s.startswith(f'{a} '):
        new = s[len(a)+1:]
    out.append(new)

print(out)

['house', 'beautiful garten', 'amazing garten of the house']

How to remove all first articles from a string?

3 Answers3